Bitcoin - implementation and protocol specs are a big problem

https://gist.github.com/1005927

by jeremie • 15 years ago

16 8 15 years ago

gist.github.com

jeremie• 15 years ago

These are not my thoughts, but found them interesting and worth sharing...

Amincd3• 15 years ago

These parts suggest the author doesn't understand it that well:

-- I can't speak to the economic implications of limiting # of bitcoins to only 21 million -- it's probably based on the fixed rate of coin generation and the desire to have it stop by 2016. ---

Bitcoins are generated until 2140.

--- Also, if you are serious about making a currency for the whole internet, 21 million seems like a few order of magnitude too small due to number of participants. --

Each coin is made up of 100,000,000 atomic units, so using the bitcoin denomination is arbitrary, and smaller denominations can be used as the value of a bitcoin increases.

antiscam3• 15 years ago

Those are the most superficial points of the post; everything else he says is spot on, particularly the disconnect between the claim the the protocol is easy to update and the nearly impassable practical obstacles to doing so for a contentious update.

Amincd3• 15 years ago

He's studying the protocol yet doesn't know when generation ends or that each coin can be divided down to the eight decimal place. It doesn't give me confidence he has done a thorough job.

The author also writes:

-- Due to the cryptographic nature of transactions, it's simply not possible to have realtime transactions with bitcoin as the network scales (it already take 5-10 mins on average for the network to see a single transaction). --

When transactions were never meant to be real-time.

The only criticism that is valid IMO is this:

-- Having the ability to upgrade algos is really, really important IMO. As it stands, the entire bitcoin economy would go to zero, nearly instantaneously, if SHA-256 is broken. There MUST be a way for the network stay ahead of crypto changes and improve security over time. Rotation of currency, as in the real world, must be designed in. --

But he offers no means of doing this while maintaining a decentralized network.

brevitae• 15 years ago

Maybe instead of arguing about Bitcoin on blogs, we could argue about it on GitHub with code. Seems more productive.

Bitcoin - implementation and protocol specs are a big problem

Related Stories